by Roy Kesey
To the kitchen, dark here too but Casualidad awake and sitting at the table. I ask why she didn’t come, and she asks what I mean. I say it doesn’t matter. She nods, asks if I want her to boil water for the morning. I say yes, then no, that I will do it myself.
Casualidad lets herself out. I limp to the window, open it, sniff around the stove. Propane leaks are common, my lights are badly wired, and I have seen disconcerting pictures of blackened remains. I turn on the light. Gnats and mosquitoes flit around the naked bulb. I stand perfectly still, try to remember what comes next.
A gecko moves onto the ceiling. Its skin is nearly transparent. I don’t know where this one goes during the day, but at night it appears here whenever the light comes on. There are other geckos too, many others. At times there is one in each room.
I watch the gecko, and at first its movements are too slow to see. Do the mosquitoes notice it at all? How good is their vision? Now the gecko is close enough and its movements are too quick to see. A mosquito is gone, swallowed, dead. There is so much to learn in this world.
4.
THE BUS PULLS ONTO THE FOURTH BRIDGE, and beneath us the causeway, thirty feet deep and fifty yards wide, almost empty because it is spring: the river is now a sordid thread. Clustered in the riverbed tight against the far bank are half a dozen shanties. Gaunt chickens skitter through scattered trash. The only green of any kind is a line of points in the loam, melons or maybe gourds.
My head and hip ache and my stomach roils and farther down the bank something moves along the top edge. It is long and black or dark gray, too thick for a snake and now out of sight, the bus jolting off the bridge onto the roadway. Mariángel climbs into my lap, points out the window at a speck in the sky. It is either a hawk or litter lifted by wind.
In two or three months the summer rains will start. The shanty owners will harvest their crops, move up onto the banks as the causeway fills. For a time it will be beautiful here along the river. People will come to the edge to watch the water move and to be calmed.
Then I remember the physicist and his prediction. I was not here in 1983 when El Niño last came, have heard that calm was no part of it, that instead of calm there was dengue and drownings, that flooding destroyed highways in all directions, that there were shortages, no kerosene or gasoline for sale, no bread, no canned milk or bottled water, no rice or sugar, no candles, no plastic sheeting, no concrete or tar or lumber. There was beer, however, for a time. It was brought by army helicopters which were scheduled to return but never did.
South now, through Miraflores and Castilla and down into the Sechura, a strip of desert that holds the Pacific and the Andes apart for twelve hundred miles. Two tiny patches of it are my central texts. Marks in the sand are the sentences, their meanings unstable, altered daily by wind or rain, by footsteps including my own. I read looking for patterns, the better to see what does not fit them—traces of what was written one night ten months ago.
Of course I do not know if any traces still exist. Stunted algarrobo, thorny scrub, a single candelabra cactus spread-armed in a clearing. The coastal plain is Peru’s cholo present, and the mountains are its indio past, and the ocean its future: this is something I have been told many times, usually by drunks in bars. To the extent it is intelligible, it is as much false as true, but there is rarely any point in disagreeing.
Mariángel stands in my lap, plays with the barrettes of the girl sitting in front of us, pulls her hair. The girl turns and smiles. I fight off a wave of nausea, and smile back.
A pacazo on the bank—I will have to remember to tell Reynaldo. I think about the odds of walking beneath one just as it began to defecate, about coincidence. It does not take long to pull up another, the taxi’s license plate starting with the first letter of Pilar’s name and ending with her age, and when mistaken for causes they can waste years of your life. Even worse, yes, the unrecorded cause that distorts a chain of events like buried ore misleading a compass, and still worse that despotic distance between lacunal source and referential past, between evidence and the act itself, and Mariángel grabs my beard, pulls my face down, forces me to look at her, and at the string of mucus she has extracted from her nose.
The barrette girl has seen and laughs. I catch Mariángel’s hand. I hold her finger up to the light. I acknowledge that as mucus goes this is an excellent specimen, wipe it from her finger onto my own, lower the window and flick.
Still half an hour away. No need for sunscreen yet but once I remembered too late and it was two bad days and nights. I take the tube from my knapsack, cover her face and neck. She does not like the smell of coconut, smears as much as she can on my pants. My own face and neck, my arms, more pointing and looking at things in the sky. She cries for a moment, the reason unclear. Then she settles, closes her eyes.
Often Reynaldo accompanies us into the desert. He hopes to find an unknown species of plant or bush or tree, has never yet found one but sometimes finds other things of interest. This weekend he is reforesting somewhere to the east. The university’s Outreach Office runs several such programs—solar panels, health clinics, rural education for the poorest. Most weekends they invite me along. I always agree to participate and no one is surprised when I do not.
The foothills are not far away but cannot be seen though the gray-brown haze. In a sense this haze ensured Pilar’s death. If the air had been clear she would have seen the Andes and known she was walking the wrong direction.
Here the highway parallels Pizarro’s route to Cajamarca. One hundred sixty-eight soldiers, hundreds of enslaved porters, a few interpreters, a few guides. In my first years here I was certain that what was needed to finish my thesis could be found in Cajamarca. Later it was simply a location where work could be done. My last visit, a few months before the wedding, and as we check into our hotel Pilar tells me she has never seen the Ransom Chamber.
The tourist board calls it the city’s sole remaining Inca structure: a chaos of old ashlar blocks and new cement. I have already been twice and it is small and bare and today I need other places but Pilar does not want to go alone and so we walk out and along, across and down, then up stairs cut in a gray stone base to the door. We buy tickets, receive brochures. While she looks at the entrance paintings–Atahualpa captured by the Spaniards, imprisoned, proposing terms for his ransom and release—I take out a pen, correct the brochure’s facts and phrasing, hand it to a guard.
The guard nods but does not understand, returns the brochure to its stack. Pilar slips in among the other tourists and gazes with them at trapezoidal niches. I follow, push only when necessary, my bulk unwelcome and stared at. Pilar is sad but delighted. I tell her that the actual ransom chamber no longer exists and was not located in this building. Now she glares, turns away.
Mariángel twists in my lap and I interrupt the nearest guide, Atahualpa a hostage yes but also a collaborator, looting his empire to save himsel—eleven tons of gold, tooled masks and statuettes, jeweled pitchers and jars, irreplaceable and vanished. But of course he was also hoping for escape or rescue, says the guide, and perhaps believed the Spaniards when they promised him a throne in Quito. How could he have believed them? I say. Yes, says the guide, but desperate men will believe anything.
He nods to me, turns back to his group, my stomach now weak again. I lower the window further, lean my head against the frame and squint into the wind. It is rumored that Rumiñavi is on his way in answer to Atahualpa’s call, leads two hundred thousand Inca warriors and thirty thousand Caribs. If this is true then by Spanish lights Atahualpa is guilty of treason, and his execution is thus necessary, justified. Soto is sent to find out, has not yet returned when Pizarro offers Atahualpa a choice of deaths: burned at the stake, or baptized and garroted. Friar Valverde leads the Spaniards in prayer as the cordel tightens at Atahualpa’s throat. When it is done Pizarro simulates a state funeral, and already the execution works backward in time, causality reversed, the Inca not a criminal but a fallen king.
The haze thi
ns slightly, the foothills visible but blurred, my headache sharper and then fading and Pilar is missing. I push through a group of Swedes, see her at the door, not leaving, just standing, waiting. I call to her, ask for a few minutes more. She looks away and I find the guide, take his arm. Rumiñavi’s army? I ask. Perhaps en route, the guide says, but still distant, or Soto would have seen them. All right, I say, and Soto’s lead scout, did he fall off the cliff, or was he pushed? The guide nods. One of many unknowables, he says. Like slivers under our fingernails, I say, and he nods again.
Pilar still waits and I lift Mariángel as she turns, ease her head back down to my knee, wipe the sweat from her temple, from her cheek. I crook my hand above her face to shade her eyes. Blackbirds on a powerline, dunes into the distance. Occasional patches of satuyo lace. A burro pulling a cart loaded with firewood, and competing teleologies, tectonic plates of blame shifting in the historiography. At first Pizarro is the only villain. A decade later he is innocent and fault is split, half for the natives who first spoke of Rumiñavi and half for the interpreters who questioned them. Forty years further along Garcilaso names eleven Spaniards, says they spoke up to stop the execution but few of them were truly in Cajamarca at the time and perhaps Porras is right and Garcilaso brought the story in from Valera who invented it to make Herrada not the knave who murdered Pizarro but the hero who avenged Atahualpa and there is a stench.
I lift slightly, look out the window and back at something dead on the road, a deer, and the guide leads his group out the door. For a moment the room is empty. I sit on the rough stone floor. Atahualpa, that leather cloak, the skins of vampire bats, in his hands a chalice made from the head of Atoc, his half-brother’s general, Atahualpa’s captor and torturer but then the escape, the civil war, Atoc falling and later beheaded, the skin dried tight to the skull, a golden bowl mounted and filled, the chicha de jora draining out through a silver spout clenched in his teeth. The guards laugh from their posts at the door of the cell. Atahualpa will never be freed and now knows it. He drinks deeply, offers the chalice to me and someone steps on my hand. Apologizes. I stand, and the man apologizes more thoroughly. I wave it away, should know better than to try to be alone in such places and Pilar, I look, she is gone and I go to the door, out to the sidewalk, and she is nowhere.
I walk quickly down Amalia Puga, a block, two, still nowhere. More quickly still, back up and past the Ransom Chamber and on toward the Plaza de Armas. Dense blue sunlight, thin dry air and I am wheezing, light-headed. I slow, cross the street, and in the shade it is twenty degrees cooler, cold.
Pilar sits on a bench and stares at the Cathedral. I join her. She does not look at me. I wait, lean forward, say that there is time for one more site before lunch, a convent archive on Jirón Ancash, closed the last several times I came and she can help me, or can do something else, whichever she prefers. She still does not look at me. I wait. I say that there is also the Departmental archive in the Belén complex. The earliest files in their Causa Ordinaria subset are from the 1590s and I have worked through most of them already but was hurried and perhaps missed something of importance. The complex is splendid, I say, a seventeenth-century hospital and church, stone carvings, and she holds up her hand. I have been to the Belén complex, she says. You sent me there last time, she says.
There are many small groups of people walking slowly through the plaza, circling the fine fountain in the center. A few palms, and stretches of grass edged with shrubs I recognize but cannot name. A very long and very steep staircase rises up the front of Santa Apolonia to the south. Halfway up the hill is an old blue and white chapel. On the summit is the stone throne from which the Inca observed his massed troops and the view is superb and I will never climb those stairs again.
I look at Pilar, wonder if that is what she wants, to climb. Wonder if I should tell her that she is sitting on or near the spot where Atahualpa was strangled. Wonder who Amalia Puga was, and what she accomplished, and Pilar says that she wants to go to Mass. I think about this. I say that we can exchange our current suite for separate rooms, if she prefers. She looks at me. I ask who Amalia Puga was. A writer, says Pilar. I wait for more. Nothing comes. So, I say. Not everyone has to know everything, she says. It’s okay to just come and look. There’s nothing wrong with just coming and looking. I say that I am sorry and she says that she knows but that I need to stop.
She is right and I love her for this. A light breeze rises, stirs her hair, and we begin to arrive. I wipe my face, put on my knapsack, lift Mariángel to my shoulder. I do not remember ever asking Pilar about Amalia Puga, and Friar Valverde repents his role, protects the natives as best he can, flees Peru after the second Almagrist coup, is eaten by cannibals on Puná. I get to my feet and wince. I limp forward, and the barrette girl reaches out to touch Mariángel’s shoes as we pass.
We come to stand beside the driver. He is not one I have seen before. Mariángel points at the burn scars on his arms and I lower her hand, ask him to stop at the stand of algarrobos ahead. The man looks at the trees, asks if I am sure. I say that I am. The man says that there is nothing in any direction for some distance. I tell him that he is wrong. The man says that getting back to Piura won’t be easy. I lower my face to his. I tell him that we will do what we have always done, flag down the first car or truck or bus that passes by. The driver shrugs, slows the bus, stops just past the algarrobos.
Nausea rises again as I step down onto the asphalt shoulder. I take three quick steps, set Mariángel on the ground, turn and vomit into the sand. Wait. Vomit again. A third time. Wait. Mariángel is crying. I spit and wipe my mouth, take her up, whisper until she stops crying.
The day’s heat is only beginning, and there are certain clouds. I put on a sling months too small for Mariángel, work her slowly into it, arrange the sunshade over her head and tuck her bottles into their straps. I check my camera’s batteries and film. I take a drink from my canteen and start walking.
The path through this mile of desert was faint at first, used only by occasional goatherds. They are the ones who found Pilar. On each trip I clarify the trail to the best of my abilities: I cut notches in cacti, stack rocks, plant crosses.
Along and along through shallow dunes, scattered scrub and grasses. The noise of highway traffic fades. A cabuya low to the ground but eight feet wide, sawtoothed and fleshy, sharp at the tips. More dunes, and the ache in my hip lessens, disappears. Then sudden movement to my right, a lizard five inches long, thin and fast, dark stripes down its side, the head a bright red. It stops, raises up, looks back. A patch of blue on its chest, and I once choked on a lizard of similar size. It was a Western fence lizard. I caught it with a long grass noose and Joel dared me to eat it. Joel was my best and for certain long stretches only friend in Fallash and I can still feel those small claws digging into the sides of my throat. My father administered the Heimlich maneuver and the lizard popped out and ran.
Immense silence now. Scattered low palo santo, ghost gray and leafless, the smell of myrrh thick in the hot air, and I remember the curandero at Huancabamba fanning the smoke in my face, hoping to heal, hoping to cleanse. Tracks here and there—goat, squirrel, ground-dwelling bird. A thicket of faique, the thorns as long as my fingers.
Mariángel starts to cry, and I bring out her juice, but that is not it, and her milk, and that is not it either. Then I check her diaper. I change her in the unsteady shade, put my knapsack back on, push forward. The dust is thick in my eyelashes. More dunes, more scrub, and a hualtaco tree explodes as we pass by, shrieking and wingbeats, the caracara lifting off, black body and mottled chest, white at the throat and wingtips, naked red on the face. Mariángel crying again and the bird arcing back toward us. I hunch down, cover her head with my hands, look around for a nest but do not see one anywhere.
Thirty feet away the bird flares, lands on an outcropping. It rolls its head and snaps it forward, rattles at us. I stand, rattle back, and Mariángel quiets. I rattle again and she smiles. We bluff a charge, Mariángel lau
ghing as she bounces against my chest, and the caracara lifts, shrieks, flies toward the highway.
- They will eat anything, I say, my voice thin and hoarse, strange to me.
Mariángel does not look up.
- Anything, and alive or dead. I have seen them dig for turtle eggs, dig for worms, have seen them attack pelicans over and over until the catch is disgorged.
Now she looks, smiles, reaches back to take hold of my beard.
- They will even chase vultures off of roadkill.
She squints and I fall quiet. The algarrobo grove is a hundred yards away. I slow down, step carefully, search the dunes to either side. Smell of heat, sweat, sand. Smell of rotting meat that fades too quickly to have been real, was some sort of olfactory mirage.
Still slower. Look again. Thirty yards. The trees are threadbare, sparse and thin. Twenty yards, ten. The path widens as it enters the grove. The sand here is no longer stained, no longer bears witness to the night my wife was raped and beaten and left for dead.
Sweat gathers in my beard, on my chest, down the center of my back. I take another drink. Then I weave through the trees, scanning the ground as I go. To the cairn I have built at the far end of the grove. I look out along another trail I have clarified to the best of my abilities. This is the path Pilar walked the next day, walked until she fell and could not rise.
Back to where I entered the grove. Begin a circle. Mariángel twists against my chest, whines, and I put a hand across her forehead, sidestep a columnar and its spines. Again to the starting point, and another circle, this one slightly larger. I must find something, anything, before we can leave. That is the arrangement.
A third circle. Into the densest part of the grove, and now more vegetation underfoot—strands of bichayo, withered borrachera. Halfway around there is a small overo, the broad leaves covered with dust. Mariángel is crying yet again and I squat in the shade, bring out her juice, bring out raisins and crackers, wait as she eats and drinks.